Hello all!
The day is finally here. After nearly 6 years of development, Final Factory has been released in Early Access!
It's been my life's dream to release a game, and it is utterly surreal as a developer to have finally reached this goal. Building Final Factory brought me to the very edge of my sanity and my ability as a developer and artist; it has been, by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. But game dev is my true passion in life, and it has brought me great fulfillment to build the game, despite the relentless nature of the work and grind.
Final Factory development began in 2018 after playing Factorio for countless hours and thus becoming indoctrinated into the automation genre. For the next 4 years, I toiled away in my spare time before finally quitting my software dev job in 2022 to pursue development full time, once I felt like I had something real on my hands.
Shot of Final Factory (then called Astero) in 2019
Final Factory would not have been possible without my wife, who agreed to support us as I pursued this dream. My gratefulness to her cannot be overstated. She has been endlessly patient and supportive, even as I've put in many 90 work hour weeks.
My best friend Ches joined me late in 2022 to help playtest. Eventually, he came on part time to help with development and game design. He's largely responsible for the tutorial and localization in the game, both of which are essential to the game's health and success.
Another close friend, Lothsahn, joined in 2023 part time to help with development as well. His contributions include refining the modding pipeline and massively improving the performance of the game, which, as we all know, is critical to an automation game. He's also fixed countless bugs and improved the quality of the codebase immensely.
Zayn Mufti came on as the composer in late 2022 as well, and has crafted an absolutely beautiful score that captures the soul of the game as I always imagined it.
And of course, I must mention my wonderful Discord community. Building this community has been one of the great joys of game development. We've cultivated a community of dedicated automation game lovers and sci-fi nerds that I couldn't be happier about.
I wanted to also make a special mention of one of our most important community members: Gherik. Gherik joined the playtest early last year and made huge contributions to feedback and bug fixing. He then became the game's first modder and was integral to the development and testing of the modding pipeline. Currently, he has many very useful mods available on the workshop!
There are so many other incredible playtesters that are listed in the game's credits as well. I love you all and cannot thank you guys enough.
Finally, I want to make one last acknowledgement to my friend Joe Bzdek, who worked with me for awhile early in the project and is a talented graphics engineer who created the Fog of War effect that we all love. He also helped develop the art-content pipeline, map generation, the player model, and the fleet logic.
Anyway, I've gone on long enough! Today, a dream is realized, and the factory must now grow.
/Slims